The Oldest Trick In The Book
by Julia456
Summary: At Jim's funeral, Ethan learns a few truths, and more than a few lies.


Disclaimer haiku:  
_The new and the old_  
_I do not own, so don't sue._  
_(Self-destruct joke here.)_

Note: The first Tom Cruise movie I liked - except for the part about Jim Phelps being the bad guy. Well. That's what fic is for.

This roughly follows the TV canon (the original 1966-73 show and the 1988-90 show) and, begrudgingly, movie canon (_M:I_ and _M:I-2)_.

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The cemetery was secluded, set well back from the road and surrounded by a tasteful brick wall. Large trees shaded many of the graves and further gave the impression of tranquil countryside.

That was a lie, Ethan knew; the cemetery was barely out of the suburbs. So many things about the world were lies. Few had wounded him as much as the ones perpetrated by the man being buried.

Jim Phelps had not left many mourners; a mere handful of people stood around the grave, black-suited and more bored than grieving. His family was dead - parents gone long ago, no cousins, no children.

No widow.

Claire's body had been interred in Arlington, after much argument on Ethan's part. It was a small victory, but a significant one: As far as the United States government was concerned, Claire Phelps had died while honorably serving her country. That wasn't true, of course, but the world was full of lies.

Without the slightest flicker of emotion on his face, Ethan watched the graveside services being carried out by the minister. Jim hadn't deserved to be buried near Claire. At the end, he'd pulled the trigger without a second thought or a single tear. How low, Ethan wondered for the millionth time, how low did someone have to sink before they would kill their friends, their teammates, their wife - for money?

The minister concluded the services, shutting his Bible with an air of solemn finality, and the mourners began to drift away. Ethan stayed where he was, intending to see the thing through to the end. There was no body in the coffin - the French authorities had barely recovered enough dental evidence to identify Jim at all - but he stayed anyway. Jim had been a father, a teacher, a friend. And even though Ethan hated him for the traitor's path he'd chosen, he still owed the man something.

"I never thought it would end like this," someone said behind him, faintly sad, faintly bored. Ethan turned to see an older woman, impeccably dressed in a black suit, gazing down at the grave with a calm, detached expression. One of the mourners. Her face seemed familiar, but he couldn't place it.

She looked up and met his eyes with a flat, faded blue gaze. The look sent a prickling sense of danger through him, despite the fact that she barely came to his chin and looked frail enough to snap if he so much as touched her. "You're Ethan Hunt, correct?"

The words were scratched by too many years of dancing with cigarette smoke, but the evidence of a long habit was nowhere etched on her face; she could have been forty, she could have been seventy. Ethan, wary, nodded.

Her attention returned to the grave. "Cinnamon Carter."

He blinked, surprised, and realized why she'd looked so familiar. Cinnamon Carter had been an IMF agent from the Cold War days, and her iron cool under the toughest situations had been held up to the newer agents as an example many times. Ethan was, in short, talking to a living legend. "You worked with Jim, back..."

"If you say, 'in the old days,' darling, I'll be very unhappy." She gave him a curving, wry smile. There was nothing warm about it, but he smiled back all the same; her infamous charm was worn and showing signs of neglect, but still present in force. "Yes, I worked with Jim," she went on, casting another look at the grave. "He was a great man - brilliant. Never in a thousand years would he have done something so reprehensible."

"I hate to tell you, but he did," Ethan said, shifting slightly to ease the lingering twinges of pain in his ribs; dodging explosions atop a train moving at high speeds left one a little bruised. He tried to keep the irony out of his voice, but there it was, along with a bitterness so sharp that it surprised even him. "I was there."

"You were, weren't you?" Cinnamon turned to leave, touching his arm lightly. "Walk with me."

It was a command, not a request, and he offered her his arm as a gentleman should.

"I knew Jim for many years. It was Jim who recruited me for the Force, back when I was only a pretty face on a magazine cover. I left the team, you know, in 1969 - over a foolish thing, a trifle." She smiled - a genuine smile this time, but still not warm, and directed inwards rather than at Ethan - then shook her head slightly and continued. "But I couldn't leave it forever. You know how it is, Ethan, once it's in your blood."

"Yes," he said softly, thinking about his renewed contract with the IMF and its CIA oversight, and how he knew better than to trust his life to those people, but how the thought of walking away brought a greater pain to his heart than even Claire's death.

Cinnamon gave his conflicted emotions the barest flicker of acknowledgement. "Jim sent me little assignments, unofficially. Enough to keep my hand in and the wolves from my door. When I left for good in 1983, he decided to retire as well. We were both past our prime as agents then; the others - Rollin, Willy, Barney - had already gone.

"Then, in 1987, Jim was reactivated - a mistake, as it turned out. _They_ wanted him to lead the next generation of IMF agents, but nature had other ideas."

_"They."_ The nameless, faceless people inside the CIA who controlled the IMF's collective destiny. Ethan knew that the remainder of the story would be bad, and he thought he could predict how it would go, but he wanted to hear Cinnamon say it. "What happened?"

"He suffered a stroke during a mission. 1989, I think it was. The entire affair was shot to hell; they barely escaped with their lives. Something you can appreciate, darling," she added, giving him a significant look. "After that, _they_ were in a quandary. His health no longer permitted any kind of covert work, not even as a safely removed overseer. Jim was a legend, a force to be feared and reckoned with. Letting word get out that he was truly retired would have been unacceptable."

Ethan shook his head in disbelief; the numbers didn't add up. "But I worked with Jim. Starting in 1991 - we did missions in the Gulf during the war."

Cinnamon abruptly stopped walking, forcing him to stop as well. "Ethan," she said patiently, as though talking to a small child, "You have seen the IMF at work. You _are_ IMF. You know our methods. A man who can't do the job, but who is needed to do the job - what's the fastest way around that?"

He stared at her for a long moment, his mind running over the information a thousand and one times and coming to the same inescapable conclusion every time. He almost refused to believe.

It was simply impossible.

But that was the point.

They were the Impossible Missions Force. Who better to hide a key player's deteriorating health? They knew how to do it; it was the oldest trick in the book, and the easiest. As basic as SOP - standard operating procedure. He'd done it himself, more times than he could count. "An impostor."

She raised an elegantly manicured hand in correction. "A substitute. Very few agents from the old days were still in the game; most were dead, and those of us who _were_ alive had retired. It didn't matter that the substitute bore only a passing resemblance to Jim - who would notice? What mattered was that he _thought_ like Jim. His mission strategies were almost perfectly identical."

"Why are you telling me this?" Ethan asked, running a hand through his hair in sudden frustration - with himself and the IMF and the man he thought he'd known, and with Cinnamon, who was telling him this story in a cool, heartless voice in the aftermath of a liar's funeral. "It doesn't change what happened. He's still a traitor, and Claire is still dead!"

"I am telling you this because in a short while, no one else will know. I'm an old lady, Ethan. I have no family, no close friends. I want someone to know the truth: That Jim Phelps was not a traitor, nor a heartless killer." She sighed, displaying a facsimile of sadness. "He was a great man. Truly brilliant."

She'd been speaking of Jim - the real Jim - in the past tense since the beginning, but somehow, caught up in chasing down lies, Ethan had not put together that the man _was_ past tense. "He's... dead?"

"Two years ago. I was at his bedside when he died," she said, very softly. For a moment, the icy demeanor cracked, and pain filled her flat blue eyes. Just as quickly, though, her face shuttered closed again, and all traces of emotion vanished. "You didn't know him, but he knew you. Jim kept track of your career. He thought that _you_, out of all of them, were the future of the IMF. And that, Ethan, is the reason I have chosen to share this with you."

He swallowed past a sudden and inexplicable lump in his throat. "Thank you, Ms. Carter."

She smiled an un-warm smile at the formality, and left him standing in the middle of the cemetery with a simple, "Goodbye, Mr. Hunt."

He turned and walked back to the grave of the man he'd known as Jim. The world was full of lies. And how strange that, no matter how many times he discovered that, it still managed to surprise him.

Ethan looked at the headstone, proclaiming to all that Jim Phelps was buried here, and wondered who it _really_ was. To die without a name - to live as another person, and lose yourself in that deception - it was a risk they all took. It didn't drive most of them to treason, though.

Without a word, he left the cemetery and the unhappy past. Better left buried.

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Cinnamon Carter retook her seat in the back of the limousine, watching Ethan trudge out of the cemetery. "He really is a bright boy."

"A credit to his agency," her companion said, nodding his white-haired head in all seriousness, then turned to face her and raised a questioning eyebrow at her improvisation. "I died two years ago?"

She leaned back in the seat and fingered the microphone that she'd been wearing; Grant, who had a rather quirky sense of humor sometimes, had elected to make it in the form of a hearing aid. "He had to be told _some_thing, Jim. I couldn't very well clear your name and expose you at the same time. Not with the work we have to do."

Jim Phelps, a more covert operative than ever before, gave her a smile that was warmer than any of her own but no less iron-edged for that. "Of course not. But as you said, he _is_ a bright boy, and a damn fine agent. We may have to tell him truths yet."

"Perhaps," Cinnamon allowed, sliding her gaze along the cemetary wall to the man walking beside it, eyes straight ahead, face grim. Perhaps. So much about the game, it seemed, rested on chance and turns of fate. Who could have known that the impostor would turn traitor and take his secrets to the grave? Who could have known that Ethan Hunt would be the one left standing?

Who, indeed.

Ethan would have done well to remember his first lesson, the only truth: God might play dice with the universe, but the IMF did not.

They watched as Ethan got into a nondescript car and drove away. Then, with no haste, Jim signaled Max - posing as the driver today - and they left as well. Mission accomplished.

The world was full of lies.

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END


End file.
